ABSTRACT
G. W. F. Hegel task in the Phenomenology of Spirit is to exhibit the path by which anyone who thinks and lives seriously can and will eventually achieve absolute knowledge. The breakdown of each mode of knowledge results in what Hegel calls an “experience”: a simultaneous transformation of the individual’s form of life and of the standard for evaluating it. The overall aim of Self-consciousness is thus to establish through its own activity what it already implicitly knows: that what appears to be other than itself is actually only itself. Self-consciousness begins with an implicit confidence that any object is only itself, that it is the only self-sufficient being and all else is appearance. Hegel, as a theoretical observer, has forgotten to consider his own relation to the idealized-individual under study. Hegel treats the attitude of desire as a pre-social one; Self-consciousness can be expressed through desire even if there are no other conscious beings in the universe.
